The Great Dane Pub & Brewing Co. — Downtown

The Great Dane opened in 1994 in the old Fess Hotel on East Doty Street, a nineteenth-century building a block off the Capitol Square, and grew into a five-pub group that is close to a Wisconsin institution. The downtown original is a brewpub in the full sense — beer brewed on site, a long menu, a beer garden, pool tables downstairs — and it is exactly the kind of place a non-drinker in this state ends up in whether they chose it or not, because it is where everyone goes after work.

So it matters more than it might elsewhere that the bar stocks Ritual Zero Proof and uses it properly. Ritual makes distilled non-alcoholic alternatives to specific spirits rather than generic botanical waters, and the Great Dane builds three drinks on its tequila and agave expressions: a dark cherry margarita, a nada-paloma and a very cherry mockarita, all recorded by BRAVA Magazine's survey of Madison mocktails. The significance is that these are shaken, soured, salted drinks with a spirit base doing the structural work — not fruit juice with a lime wedge. A brewpub whose own product is beer has no commercial reason to buy in a non-alcoholic tequila; doing it anyway is a choice about hospitality.

The practical case is the hours and the room. It opens at 11am on weekdays and 10am at weekends and runs to 11pm most nights and 1am on Friday and Saturday, so it covers lunch, dinner and late. It is large enough to absorb a group without a reservation, which the smaller Capitol Square cocktail bars in this guide are not. And it is thirty seconds from Lucille on King Street and two minutes from Merchant and Settle Down Tavern on Pinckney — the whole downtown cluster is walkable. Be clear that this is a working brewery pub and beer is the point of it; the alcohol-free drinks are good, but the room is not a quiet one.